Woolly

by Ben Mezrich

  The episode reminded Bobby of the first interview he’d had with George Church, which had eventually led to him and Gurjeet packing up their lives to resettle in Boston, God and U.S. Customs willing.

  Bobby’s road to the Church Lab had actually been fairly smooth, up until that first interview. His parents’ efforts had paid off, and Bobby had excelled in school, especially the sciences. He’d finished high school a year early, entering the University of Waterloo as one of the top engineering candidates. Originally, inspired by the movie Back to the Future, and hoping to one day be an inventor like Doc Brown, he’d seen himself as an engineer. Conducting pure research, with no practical aim, didn’t intrigue him as much as the idea of creating something that could be used by real people.

  During college, he’d married Gurjeet, whom he had met through an online Indian dating website. An emergency room nurse from a religious Sikh background, she offered a perfect counterpoint to his scientific ideologies. Even as he shifted from engineering into the biological sciences, realizing that the revolution going on in genetics had turned biology into something more akin to engineering, but with much higher stakes, she could temper his urges to push beyond reasonable boundaries.

  Bobby had become fascinated by the idea of reversing the aging process. Aging had a genetic component—the way human cells declined and deteriorated with age had to do with the information coded in those twisting strips of genetic material. His personal research into the subject was what first led him to the naked mole rat.

  “It’s this ugly little creature,” he said to the Customs agents, getting more excited the more he talked, waving his hands in front of him. “Utterly hairless. Has no sensitivity to pain. It’s completely blind. It lives its whole life underground.”

  Gurjeet was poking him again, trying to get him to edit himself, but he ignored her.

  “But see, it doesn’t get cancer. And it lives for thirty years. Regular mice live two years, three tops. But the naked mole rat is special. We don’t know why. That’s what we are trying to figure out.”

  It was the naked mole rat that had led Bobby to George Church. Nearing the end of his Ph.D. work in Canada, Bobby had begun looking for postdoc jobs that had something to do with research into reversing aging. He’d done a computer search of online job openings involving aging, by simply entering the keywords “naked mole rat.” The Church Lab had immediately come up. Church and some of his postdocs had been studying the naked mole rat, to try to figure out how to transfer its amazing longevity to human cells.

  When Bobby had shown the research, and the possible job opening, to Gurjeet, she had initially wondered if Church and his team were crossing an ethical line. Trying to treat aging—was this playing God? Bobby had argued back. After all, Gurjeet worked in a hospital where she changed people’s fates every day. Aging, to Bobby, was a disease, and maybe Church and the naked mole rat might one day provide a cure. Bobby had instantly applied to Church’s lab, and shortly afterward had been granted an interview.

  At the moment, half off the couch as he went deeper into the physiology of underground rodents, Bobby could feel the sweat running down his back, just as it had when he’d first met George Church in his office on the second floor of the New Research Building. To Bobby, Church had been intimidating—tall, brilliant, not wasting any time on small talk or social niceties—and also prone to silences, like the Customs agents. The quieter Church got, the more nervous Bobby became, and he’d started to fill that silence any way he could. The night before, in order to prepare for the interview, Bobby had reread the book Church had written about genetics, and without thinking he started to critique it—to tell Church everything he thought Church had gotten wrong. Specifically, how Church had written about DNA being the original storage medium in living cells, when Bobby believed it was most likely RNA.

  When Bobby had finally finished speaking, Church had looked at him much the same way the Customs agents were now looking at him. Bobby had been about to stammer out an apology when a secretary signaled that it was time for them to head to where Bobby was supposed to give a talk about his own Ph.D. work to the lab’s other postdocs.

  Church walked him down the long hallway leading to the conference room in total silence. Bobby had felt as if he was on his way to the electric chair. And when he’d arrived at the conference room, things only got worse. He found himself facing a room filled with more than eighty scientists—pre- and postdocs ranging in age from their early twenties to their late sixties. He had expected to be speaking to a group of five, maybe ten people; he had interviewed at other labs over the years, and usually these things involved no more than a handful of students asking easy questions.

  “My interview is open to the whole department?” he’d asked Church.

  “Just the lab. Whenever you’re ready.”

  And then Church had left him alone at the front of the room. Bobby had made it through the talk, sweating through a dozen of the most difficult questions he’d been asked since his Ph.D. thesis defense. When Church came back to gather him to return to the lab to finish his interview, Bobby tried to get a read on how he had done.

  But Church had only glanced at him, then mumbled under his breath: “RNA as the original storage medium. Hmm.”

  That night, when Bobby had returned to Toronto, his wife had agreed—he had blown any chance of working in the Church Lab. When the email had come a week later telling him he’d gotten the position, he had been too shocked to celebrate. Then he and Gurjeet started to plan for a new life.

  “And of course you’re welcome to visit the lab,” Bobby heard himself saying, as the Customs agents looked at him as if he was insane. “Or actually I’ve got my thesis work right in the trunk of the car. Just give me a moment and I’ll go get it.”

  Their life wasn’t going to be lavish, that was for sure. Postdocs were barely paid living wages, and the apartment he’d found near Fenway Park might have reminded his parents of where they had grown up in India. But he’d be working with George Church, as well as some of the most brilliant young scientists in the world. Already, he’d made an effort to meet all the postdocs he could, and to find out the various projects they were working on. Luhan Yang had stood out in particular. Her thesis work had completely blown him away, and the two of them had even hit it off. They were in the early stages of planning a project they might work on together, involving isolating stem cells from mouse ovaries and getting them to turn into mature eggs. Eventually, they hoped to do the same thing with mouse sperm; one day, it might be possible to make sex itself redundant, because it could all be done in a dish. Bobby hadn’t run that one by Gurjeet yet, because he assumed she’d have some concerns. But it might have fascinating implications for the future of IVF, in vitro fertilization.

  To Bobby’s surprise, as he was still talking about mole rats, one of the Customs agents appeared with his Ph.D. thesis from the trunk of his car. As the other agents leafed through it, Bobby could see that they were finally beginning to believe him—he wasn’t some sort of crazy genetic terrorist, he was a Harvard postdoc. Any minute now, they were going to let him go.

  He couldn’t wait to get back on the road. The more he thought about the Church Lab, the more excited he became. There was no end to the science he was going to be able to do there. In fact, Luhan had recently contacted him about another project Church himself had put her on, which she believed would interest Bobby. He didn’t yet know the details, but he was sure that, if Church and Luhan were involved, it was going to be special.

  Glancing from the agents, who were still leafing through his Ph.D. thesis, to his wife, who was ready to stab him to death with her fingernails, he guessed that, whatever Church and Luhan were up to, it probably wasn’t something he should try to explain in the holding cell of a Canada/U.S. border crossing.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Early 2013

  77 AVENUE LOUIS PASTEUR, HARVARD MEDICAL SCHOOL.

  At the Elements Café, on the first floor, a
circular table for four sat up against a vast picture window overlooking a highly trafficked crosswalk.

  Justin Quinn, twenty-eight years old, animal enthusiast, former car salesman, community college graduate, and self-described molecular ninja, was used to feeling out of place, but even for him, this was surreal. He was at Harvard. In a posh little cafeteria in a medical school building dedicated to futuristic sciences, he was surrounded by people who’d mostly gone to expensive prep schools, achieved perfect SAT scores, attended top-rated colleges that Quinn could never have gotten into, let alone have afforded. Quinn had grown up dirt-poor in Amesbury, Massachusetts, raised by his mother and stepfather after his biological father walked out. He had scraped his way through higher education, taking ten years to get a college degree by way of three different universities. Yet somehow, he had found himself here, sipping black coffee from a cup with the Harvard seal inked around its base, heat seeping through the boldly scripted letters, Veritas, stinging the inside of his palm.

  Quinn squirmed against the hard plastic chair tucked beneath the table, which was overflowing with genetic data printouts, Woolly Mammoth photos, and at least three laptops and four iPads, none of which was his. Still, he was determined to look confident, to appear, somehow, as if he belonged.

  At the very least, he had dressed the part. He was wearing a baby blue T-shirt emblazoned with a cartoon picture of a Woolly Mammoth. The baseball hat pulled over his eyes depicted a Woolly Mammoth skeleton above the rim. And around his neck was a necklace made of real Woolly Mammoth ivory, bought from a website he’d found while scouring eBay, unsuccessfully, for a slightly used Mammoth tusk that wouldn’t cost more than his childhood home.

  No one could say he wasn’t sartorially prepared for the first official meeting of the Woolly Mammoth Revivalists. He felt justified in making the extra effort, considering he had the honor of being the last Revivalist to join the team.

  On paper and in person, the other three members of the team sitting across from him were impressive, the brightest bunch of young people Quinn had ever met. Luhan Yang, their leader, was going to be tough to impress. And she had been looking him over with a mixture of curiosity and thinly veiled suspicion. Each swipe of her dark eyes sent chills up his spine.

  Bobby Dhadwar, next to her, moving his fingers across one of the iPads, had a master’s in engineering and a Ph.D. in biology, and was a little less intimidating than Luhan—he smiled a lot and his glasses were covered in fingerprints, which gave him a professorial aura well beyond his years. Quinn had heard him talking to his colleagues about how he and his wife were in the process of trying to start a family, which made him seem like a human being, at least, which was more than Quinn could say about some of the robotic-looking people he’d seen walking the halls of the New Research Building.

  Margo Monroe, Luhan’s other addition to the team, had a Ph.D. in biomedical engineering from BU. Smart and pleasant, she was wearing earrings shaped like elephants, which was a big plus.

  Looking at the three of them, Quinn felt the need to prove his worth, to show he was ambitious, that he brought something to the table. Setting his coffee down next to one of the laptops and attacking the keyboard, he continued the conversation that Luhan had begun.

  “The way I see it, we can break this down into what we’re going to need, what we already have, and what we’ve got to do. And the first thing we’re going to need are elephant cells to work with. Although the samples we will need will be small individually, over time we’ll need a fair amount. Obviously we can take great care to harvest tissue without causing injury or pain, but we will need living cells. Which means contacting zoos, research centers, conservation groups.”

  It felt good to be talking, because at least for the moment, that meant the other team members were listening; and besides, Quinn truly enjoyed making plans. Probably because so much of early life had simply happened to him. As a child of blue-collar poverty, he hadn’t had a lot of options. He’d developed a love for animals while volunteering with his mother at a nearby wildlife rehabilitation center, which had led to an interest in biology and endangered species, but the local public schools had offered only the most basic courses in biology: cut up a frog, look at some pond scum under a microscope.

  After high school, the best option his family could afford seemed to be St. Anselm, a parochial college in Manchester, New Hampshire, run by Benedictine monks. But they’d barely made it through half the orientation presentation on the very first day of freshman year when he realized the place wasn’t for him: no driving, no talking to girls after 8:00 p.m., no leaving campus. He was gone before the monks in charge started passing out name tags.

  Which meant two years of community college paid for by scholarships, then a transfer to University of New Hampshire, until the money ran out. Then a few years selling cars to make enough to finish college. By the time he’d graduated with a degree in biochemistry and a minor in genetics, his mother had gotten sick—cancer—leaving him devastated and broke.

  He was probably at the lowest point in his life when he met George Church, mostly by accident. Needing money, and wanting to do something in genetics and biology, he’d found a job at a start-up in Cambridge called Warp Drive. Warp Drive, one of the many companies that Church had cofounded, was focused on applying synthetic biology to organisms mined from nature for medicinal uses. The company scoured isolated places like the Amazon and the island of Rapa Nui (Easter Island), then used genetic engineering to turn natural bacteria and plants into medical treatments and cures. Quinn had found a place in the genetic engineering department, learning the ins and outs of molecular modification as he went.

  So even though he didn’t have the schooling of the other Revivalists at the table, he was far from a novice at genetic engineering.

  “And then we need to figure out what genetic traits we’re going to go after,” he continued, typing into the laptop. “What makes a Mammoth a Mammoth.”

  The other Revivalists took over the conversation there, Luhan leading the spirited discussion while Bobby and Margo used the other laptops and iPads to conduct research on the fly. It wasn’t easy, trying to pin down the most characteristic traits of the iconic, prehistoric creature. The two other laptops were opened to encyclopedia-like articles on Mammoths, while the iPads cycled through scientific journals for deeper analysis of the various possibilities.

  Eventually, the team settled on thirteen traits of the Mammoth, four of which they considered most significant and would become their primary targets. The first, most visible characteristic was the thick hair for which they were named, and which protected their skin from the intense cold.

  The second trait was the thick layer of subcutaneous fat that provided insulation against the severe cold of the Mammoth’s habitat, and also gave them substance when they hibernated, which modern elephants didn’t do.

  The third characteristic was the Mammoth’s small, rounded ears—very different in appearance from the large, flapping appendages of elephants.

  And last, and perhaps the most difficult of the traits to isolate genetically, was the Mammoth’s hemoglobin, which, unlike that of elephants and most mammals that evolved to live in temperate, or non–ice age, climates, functioned in cells at nearly freezing temperatures. For human beings—and modern elephants—in subzero conditions, the oxygen within hemoglobin binds too tightly, and the peripheral tissues freeze and die. A Mammoth’s blood was able to flow and release oxygen no matter how cold it was.

  The four main traits decided, Luhan shifted to the second phase of the project:

  “Then comes the hard part. We need to find those traits within the Woolly Mammoth’s genetic sequence. Figure out which genes code for those traits.”

  “Which means we need a properly sequenced genome of a Mammoth,” Bobby chimed in.

  “What about the Penn State project?” Margo asked. Penn State had conducted the original Mammoth sequencing that had led Nicholas Wade from the New York Times to call Chu
rch—the reason they were all gathered together in the first place.

  “Funny thing about that,” Bobby said. “They actually had a partial sequence up online for a while. But they took it down. I tried contacting them, but they haven’t gotten back to me.”

  Most likely, Quinn guessed, there were problems with their sequence. It was a pretty incredible task—sequencing a ten-thousand-year-old creature from a small sample. Not to mention the fact that the Mammoth had four billion base pairs in its DNA, a full billion more than the DNA of a human being.

  “There are other groups with Mammoth material,” Luhan said. “There’s a team in Chicago working on it, and also the Reich lab here at Harvard. The Reich lab’s sequence should be of sufficient quality, and Dr. Church mentioned to me in our last meeting that they’ll be open to letting us use it for our Revival.”

  There were certainly benefits to being at Harvard, and in Church’s lab. In fact, Church had recently gotten them their own sample of frozen Mammoth from a Canadian collector, a little piece of Woolly intestine that was now sitting in a freezer on the second floor of the New Research Building. If they’d had the time, the money, and the inclination, they could have sequenced it themselves; but fortunately, they wouldn’t need to. Because Church was one of the biggest proponents of open-source science, he had fostered a wonderful sense of camaraderie among other genetic scientists.

  It was Church’s openness that had led to Quinn’s having the opportunity to be at that table in the first place. Once Church, Brand, and Phelan had officially decided to launch the Revival project, they had arranged a TEDx Talk on de-extinction, in conjunction with National Geographic. Quinn had listened to it multiple times, and had immediately wanted to get involved.

  As a cofounder of Warp Drive, Church visited the start-up about once a month; it was during one of those visits that Quinn had jumped all over him.